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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

COS304 Azure Storage Deep Dive

Speaker: Chris Auld

Scalable - You will run out of money before disk.
Exposed
15 cents per gigabyte to store.
RESTful Web Services
- Use Azure or local apps.
Asian data centres are more expensive for data.
.
Can CDN Enable Account
Account is secured with a 512 bit shared secret key.
500 TB per account.
Storage in the Development Fabric
- good for developing offline.
- costs minimal (cents) if developing with less than 1 GB of data a month.

Storage Security

- HTTPS
- Digitally sign requests for privileged operations.

Azure Storage Abstractions

Blobs - Could be used to serve static content. 60 MB/s output speed.
Account
Container - Grouping of blobs. Limited throughput per container.
Blob - Identified by name
Pages / Blocks - two types of blob.
Blob is always accessed by name.
Special $root container. - Allows for definition of clientaccesspolicy.xml
http://[account].blob.core.windows.net/[containter]/[blobname]
Can use prefix/delimiter and special blob naming to simulate directory structure.
Pagination - returns continuation token (MarkerValue) to continue beyond page.
Use Affinity group to keep computing and storage together and avoid paying for extra network traffic.
Block Blob - used for streaming an entire file.
ETags - versioning support over HTML
Block blobs - can be uploaded in parallel via blocks and then recombined in Windows Azure Storage. Makes retry more efficient.
Page Blob - targeted at random read/write workloads.
Fixed 512 bytes
Shared Access Signatures - E.g. Grant read access to a certain blob for a period of time and then pass to client as a URL. Revoke by timeout or via a container level policy that can be deleted.
Ad Hoc Signatures.
Policy Based Signature - container level policy allows revoking.
Drives - Wrap the blob storage and allow NTFS volumes
Tables -
Queues -

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Public blobs can be served via the Windows Azure CDN URL.
Could map custom domain to the CDN.